Ecuador Insider Articles Archives

Every day I have a euphoric experience, and it is due to realizing the daily reality of living in the place I have chosen to make my home for life—Cuenca, Ecuador.

"I savor the days that I can work completely from home,” says Carolyn Hamilton. “Now that I don’t have a 9-to-5 job, I can completely indulge my personal creativity and that’s a great plus for me at this time in my life.”

I was a little choked up on stage at the amount of applause when I proclaimed to the audience, “Hooray, I’m fat.” I was giving a talk at a recent International Living conference. It was an overview of the healthcare system in Ecuador, with personal descriptions of visits to clinics, doctors, and even hospitals taken from real-life experiences.

Family and friends in my hometown, Seattle, often ask me, “What do you do all day?” With maids and laundry services, expats here in Cuenca, Ecuador, have lots of extra time to spend indulging ourselves. One woman I know weaves, paints, and plays bridge once a week.

“You’re out of your mind!” This was one of the milder things people said when I announced that after 30 years of living in the paradise of Maui, Hawaii, I was moving to South America. And at 80 years of age. Alone. Without speaking a word of Spanish.

As a child, I dreamed of living on a farm. I wasn’t much interested in tractors and combine harvesters, but the thought of a life that revolved around animals thrilled me. Alas, my parents both grew up on farms in the Midwest and had no interest in running one of their own.

I’ve often said that Ecuador offers expats and retirees some of the best bang-for-buck affordability in the Americas. But it’s not simply low prices that earn it that title in my book. “Bang for your buck” means getting top value, and Ecuador is simply an unparalleled value in so many ways.

Ecuador’s capital city, Quito, located high in the Andes mountains at 9,350 feet, is the highest capital city in the world. It is also one of the most dramatically situated, hemmed in by encircling peaks and volcanoes.

We were young retirees, aged 55, when my husband, Mark, and I retired to Ecuador in 2010. At the time, there were just a handful of expats roaming the cobblestone streets of Cuenca. Gringo sightings were rare and we’d point and whisper, “look, there’s an expat.”

I was talking to someone in the States the other day about my life in Ecuador, and he asked a question that an expat hears often: “Don’t you get homesick?” This is not a trivial question, and one that anyone thinking of moving to another country should consider.